Preparing Lessons, Milking Cows and Dinner Duty!

For the past few days we have been mostly preparing lessons.  So we have been cooped up in the DST office with the friendly gekkos.  There is an open day at the school on Saturday so all the students and teachers are busy preparing for that.  It’s amazing how efficient they can be when there is a deadline-even the construction workers that are building the new finishing school appear to be on fast forward!  I am looking forward to it as we will get the opportunity to meet previous VA students. We are hoping to have brief interviews with them to see if we can identify any gaps in the school that we could try and fill.

I am currently preparing 2x lessons, one on maps and ‘plane table’ surveying-which I am embarrassed to admit took a lot of googleing for me to work out what it was all about! Basically its just a table on a tripod and there is an alidade which you look through and draw a parallel line on.  Then you measure the distance of the point from the tripod and mark that on the drawing to scale. I know-it’s so simple-it was beyond me!  And the second lesson is on leveling.  I’m looking forward to these lessons and will hopefully get a play with the equipment tomorrow.

Students making a rain gauge

In my last lesson (which took closer to 3 hours rather than the 50 mins expected!) I taught about the weather and weather instruments.  I gave the students material to make specific instruments and let them design them themselves.  This was a fun activity as it got them thinking and scavenging the campus for further materials.  We then used the instruments to calculate wind speed and direction.  I was caught out with conversions, it took approximately 25min for the students to convert m/hr into km/hr. I will try and make this more clear next time.

My class with their weather instruments

We had a stroll into Pabal the other evening to go and see a grave of Mastani, a Muslim wife of a popular Maharasta king.  It was very beautiful but pretty run down as the government don’t appear to look after their historic monuments. 

Pabal is a funny village, its roads are made from mud which gets pretty filthy when it rains.  The buildings are random, with some made of concrete, some with corrugated iron and some with wood.  There are also pigs running around everywhere.  We think they are lovely but the locals believe they are dirty as they eat all the rubbish-its just as well though as otherwise the town would smell of rotting food.  We thought someone owned them but they are wild. 

Me attempting to milk an angry cow

On campus we have quite an array of wildlife also. There are loads of squirrels which are so cute and mischievous.  We get little birds flying into our room and we even have an old nest inside.  There is a huge family of rooks that sleep in the tree outside our room and the make such a horrible gargling racket! Very eerie! There are also lots of gekkos and some big lizards that help clear away some of the pesky flies and mozzies.  And the school stray dogs that bark away at night and the occasional rat that runs above us in the kitchen.  We’ve been told that there are snakes as well but I’ve been trying not to think about that! J  As well as the wildlife we have goats, chicks and cows on campus.  I held a chick a few days ago and already it has grown so big! They will get sold at the market in a few weeks.  The goats are great-we feed them our apple peelings every day and they get very excited!  I also finally plucked up the courage to milk a cow the other day. I was a bit rubbish at it but I was told that the cow was angry and not giving much milk so it was not just my technique.  I need to get up early to milk the friendly productive cow in the morning one day.

One of our dinner ladies preparing rice

I’m on ‘Dinner Duty’ this week (or maybe 2 weeks-I’m not sure!) it means that I’ve got to help set up dinner for the students with some other students.  I’m not very good at it though as I can’t seem to put cups down in a straight line! Then after dinner (which I need to wolf down which I find difficult) I check the other student’s plates that they have cleaned.  It’s funny as all of us on duty I’m sure secretly enjoy the power of turning people back for having a spot of soap on a plate.  I only do it as that’s what has happened to me in the past few weeks!

Week 1! Trusses, Bio fuel & Soak Pits

We have now been at the engineering school Vigyan Ashram for a week.  We have our own room with ‘delux western style toilet’ J.  We eat with the students and as we are guests we get to sit at the table. The food is very tasty, but I do sense that in a few weeks time I may have grown tired of rice three times a day!

We have smoothed over our first few teething problems that were mostly due to confusion in translation.  We were unsure of relationships with management and the teachers but that is now much better.  We obviously want to work with the teachers as they will be the ones implementing our lessons when we leave.  Both the engineering and energy teachers have broken English, and our marahti is obviously terrible so it was tricky initially. 

At the moment our project involves creating (and teaching with the help of a translator) theoretical lessons which are based on powerpoint.  We really weren’t sure about this as the cost for projectors is very high.  However, we were constantly reassured that this was what they wanted.  The idea is that these can be easily used in other schools that share the Vigyan Ashram curriculum.  So far we have delivered a lesson on trusses complete with construction of a bamboo truss (thank you Clare Farm!).  I am helping with the ‘energy and environment’ class and managing thus far to dodge electronics!  I have delivered a lesson on biomass plants and will give one tomorrow on  soak pits and sanitation.  Abi is helping with the engineering class and so is developing ways of teaching about moments and pulleys and relating them back to the projects that the students are working on. (design of wheel barrow, seed planter etc)

There are about 50 students here including just 5 girls.  This is because it is an engineering school that is meant for school drop outs. Supposedly village girls are lucky to go to school the first time so getting a second chance is almost unheard of-last year there were none.  The students come and stay at VA for 1 year.  They work Sunday through to Friday.  They stay in one class-either food lab, energy & environment, engineering or animal husbandry for 3 months.  Then they rotate.  They all have to work around the campus, some do the biomass, some look after the cows/goats/chickens, others control the water or clean rooms.  They earn money for this that goes towards their school fees.  I think they learn a lot from this as well as from the lessons.

The name of the school was explained to us the other day by Amma-the wife of the founder of the school.  Vugyan=science and Ashram is like a temple.  So during the day the students learn about science but when in the kitchen they must treat it as an ashram.  This means no talking-it took us a while and a few strange looks until we worked this out! They also practice meditation and general thoughts and manners in the kitchen.  I think the two work very well together and we have been lucky to join them in meditation a few times already.

Yesterday we had a lovely day with the ladies who cook the meals.  They invited us to make chiptaties (which is surprisingly difficult!) and then to accompany them into the village to go to the market.  From looking at Google maps its clear to see that the village is a market town.  They have a market every Friday and the village was very busy.  It was great seeing all the exciting looking vegetables and trying to work out what on earth was going on-sometimes she gave bananas instead of money and then we left the bags of vegetables in a sweet shop-bizarre!  Me and abi treated ourselves to some overpriced apples that had been imported from chillie-they are about the same price as they were at home but the ladies were horrified at the cost!  We are rationing them now J  they then took us into a temple which was so very beautiful especially compared to the rest of the village! We followed their invites and prayed and touched our heads with ash.  Then we all hung up bells for a god-Ive yet to google it to work out what it meant!

Us making chipatits!

Today I have spent the day producing my lessons-animations take a terribly long time!  We are trying to eliminate words wherever possible however we are told they will be translated for when they use them again.  

Pune

After 3 flights from edinburgh (including one in business class :-)) we arrived in Mumbai. We were met by our taxi driver (who bumped his car even before leaving the car park!) then zoomed and honked our way to pune.  We are staying in a teachers hostel where we have our own room which is great.  There is no shower but a bucket which is fun.  We had a stroll yesterday and bought some traditional clothe s and some local cuisine.  i had my first dosa-which i thought was going to be like a pancake but more like a big crisp!

Today we met with Yogesh and discussed our project.  we will be creating theoretical lessons and material which we will teaching through a translator.  The lessons are only 40 mins and the rest of the day will be assisting with the practical skills and preparing for the next day.  We will be traveling to pabal on saturday.

journey begins!!